A Twitter lawyer has threatened to file a lawsuit against Meta in a letter addressed to CEO Mark Zuckerberg. The letter, dated July 5, alleged that Meta has misappropriated Twitter’s trade secrets and intellectual property. It was signed by lawyer Alex Spiro.
According to a copy of the letter which is circulating on social media, the company said, “Over the past year, Meta has hired dozens of former Twitter employees. Twitter knows that these employees previously worked at Twitter and that these employees had and continue to have access to Twitter's trade secrets and other highly confidential information.”
While the companies have not officially issued a statement on this issue, Twitter owner Elon Musk reacted to a news report on the bird app, saying, “Competition is fine, cheating is not.” Meanwhile, Meta’s Communication Director Andy Stone wrote on Threads that the company has not hired any former Twitter employee.
The developments come amid the buzz around the new Threads app which hit the market on Wednesday. Within just 16 hours of its launch, the app reportedly managed to garner 30 million downloads. New users are allowed to register using their Instagram ids.
Meta’s Threads is the latest addition to the list of competitors who are looking to capture Twitter’s market since the takeover of the app by billionaire Elon Musk. Since taking over the app, Musk has cut down the workforce of Twitter by over 75 per cent and has also introduced several radical changes to how the app worked. The bird app has introduced a premium blue service for users who are looking to have the verified mark on the platform and features like edit. It also introduced different rate limits which restricted how many posts a user could see in one day.
Many have complained about changing nature of Twitter’s services and vowed to quit the platform. In this background, several apps like Mastodon, Bluesky and Threads are trying to make a mark in the space.
